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By Root 4314 0

“Young America,” as the country was called by Great Britain, had succeeded in its westward expansion, The Winning of the West was Roosevelt at his nationalistic apogee. “His Americanism,” Burroughs wrote, “charged the very marrow of his bone.”43 Frederick Jackson Turner, still a relatively obscure historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, praised the volumes in The Dial, saying that Roosevelt had dealt “impartially and sensibly with the relations of the pioneers and Indians whom they disposed.” 44 The Atlantic Monthly commended Roosevelt for his “natural, simple, picturesque” style.45 According to the New York Times, the volumes were admirable in their “thoroughness” and written by a “man who knew the subject.”46 Great Britain’s finest review publications—including the Saturday Review and the Spectator—all gave thumbs up.47 What none of these glowing reviews pointed out was that Roosevelt had pioneered in writing a new kind of popular scientific history, melding Parkmanism with Darwinian thinking and a full jigger of Mayne Reid to boot. Some passages directly echoed The Oregon Trail and On the Origin of Species, and even The Scalp-Hunter.48 The consensus was clear: the historian Roosevelt had a knack for not putting the reader to sleep.

For his own part, Roosevelt was proud that The Winning of the West was more in the tradition of Francis Parkman than Henry Adams’s History of the United States in America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, whose first volume also appeared that year. Besides writing about westward expansion as Parkman had done, Roosevelt had infused his narrative history with scientific explanations. “Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch of literature,” Roosevelt wrote; “and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be readable.”49

Yet, as Roosevelt was apt to do, he felt the sting of criticism more than the high-minded accolades. Accusations abounded that the The Winning of the West had been a rush job. Typos and minor mistakes could be found. The Atlantic Monthly, for example, pointed out that Roosevelt had misidentified John Randolph of Roanoke, and the New York Sun charged him with unethically paraphrasing a book by the scholar James R. Gilmore.50 An exclamation of anger broke from Roosevelt’s pen, for he knew his public reputation was under assault. Roosevelt dealt with each charge differently: he befriended the Atlantic Monthly’s editor but put the kibosh on the envious Gilmore in a very public rebuttal to the charge of quasi-plagiarism. By confronting his tormentors, Roosevelt escaped the turbulent waters of bad publicity unscathed. By emulating Parkman, Roosevelt prided himself in having written the “history of the American forest.”51

Basking in the sunshine of literary fame, Roosevelt wrote to Francis Parkman himself—who the previous year had written an important conservation-oriented article, “The Forests of the White Mountains,” for Garden and Forest 52—and told Parkman about his future plans as an author. Although not an environmentalist in the modern sense of the term, Parkman was a premier naturalist and horticulturist of his day, running a nursery in Massachusetts to supplement his career as a historian. Clearly Roosevelt wanted to show Parkman that, he too, used wilderness and fauna as his background for historical events.53 “I am pleased that you like the book,” he wrote on July 13, 1889. “I have always had a special admiration for you as the only one—and I may very sincerely say, the greatest—of our two or three first class historians who devoted himself to American history; and made a classic work…. I have always